2023-10-29 12:43:45
Literature Navid Kermani
What happens in 365 days of reading therapy
As of: 11:55 a.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes
Tells about wild readings: Navid Kermani
Quelle: Christoph Hardt / picture alliance / Panama Pictures
The writer Navid Kermani has come up with a female alter ego for his new novel: an intellectual of Iranian origin who reads for a year to mourn – including repulsive books. She even meets some authors in real life.
The content of the almost 600 pages of Navid Kermani’s “The Alphabet to S” can be quickly summarized: It’s about everything. About life and death, love, indifference, about sex, piety, grief, happiness, identity politics, gender roles, near-death experiences, imaginary tram flirtations, about sports, going to the theater, trips to Egypt and Iran, about banalities and the sublime, about afternoon naps and mysticism. The existence and thinking of the nameless first-person narrator, a woman around 50 who was created by Kermani in his image, takes place between such things. Like the author, his main character was born in Germany to an Iranian couple and became one of the nation’s most prominent intellectual voices.
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In the first pages, the protagonist buries her mother according to Islamic rites in a Cologne cemetery. At the same time, she mourns the end of her relationship with the father of her teenage son. Both strokes of fate have a long-lasting effect, and more are on the horizon. In order not to sink into existential chaos, the woman comes up with a double system of order. On the one hand, she will keep a “diary without a date”: for a year, she will fan out her inner and outer experiences into 365 numbered entries, arranged only according to the seasons. Secondly, she now finally wants to get to grips with the books from her enormous library that she hasn’t opened before, or has only opened cursorily. So everything that was intentionally overlooked between “Aeschylus and Tsvetaeva”. The fact that it finally ends with the letter S, and therefore with Nelly Sachs, is due to the fact that even the resolution, implemented with the strictest discipline, soon follows an unpredictable logic of its own, cleverly staged by Kermani.
An original reading log
So this book, labeled as a “novel”, is, in addition to all its reportage-like, documentary, autofictional and poetological parts, above all a stimulating, extremely original reading protocol. Because Kermani’s heroine has no fear whatsoever about getting something from those authors who she actually finds repulsive. This is particularly true for Peter Altenberg, who openly confessed to pedophilia in fin de siècle Vienna. It is said that in his decadence suada he got to the heart of the specifically modern experience of alienation.
Paul Nizon and Ernst Jünger are also read with ambivalent feelings and thoughts. In addition to Julien Green, the “reading writer” eventually falls hopelessly for Emily Dickinson. She had originally dismissed their poems as “women’s literature,” only then did she read up on Emil Cioran, the virtuoso, bad-tempered dark man of 20th century literature, and was infected by his dark and sincere enthusiasm for Dickinson. There are also authors who not only play a role in the protagonist’s “reading crypt,” but also in her life. Above all, a mysterious writer named Offenbach, who is reminiscent of Martin Mosebach. Helene Hegemann, Péter Nádas and Attila Bartis also make physical appearances.
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Probably the most boring and false accusation that can be made against this book comes in the form of the question of whether Kermani has made a mistake by letting a female self narrate the story. Does a woman really think like that? Isn’t this more like the brainchild of a man? Because behind this complaint lies nothing other than an overly rigid idea of how exactly a woman should think, feel and perceive, simply because she is a woman. Kermani gives his narrator alter ego every opportunity for self-destruction and development. And, last but not least, it frees the minds of its readers from unusable templates.
Navid Kermani: The alphabet to p. Hanser, 592 pages, 32 euros
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